Envy isn’t clearly delineated. You can envy in countless ways. You can envy someone’s ideas and not recognize it as envy. As you are busy envying their ability to have these ideas, you aren’t listening to them. Nor having the realization that these ideas are being shared with you and can now be called yours by just a matter of deciding it’s so.

Envy can trip you up in a lot of ways while what you admire is automatically yours. People like instant gratification, but never permit it. See a beautiful piece of art in a museum? That beauty is yours. With admiration you can realize that beauty is a transcendent trait. Beauty is in the eye and soul of the beholder. Like affects like, like attracts like, and like recognizes like. We have natural behaviours that we talk ourselves out of, and we have literally no reason.

Be what you want to have? Yes, exactly. What child will naturally hesitate to declare something pretty or cool?

I guess they aren’t comparing it to everything else in their mental inventory? Indeed they aren’t, and they have boundless enthusiasm for life. This is not foolishness. Imagine if we preserved this in ourselves? Would anyone be unhappy? How can you be unhappy when you are forever seeing pretty or interesting things? Envy is why we don’t see this anymore. As I said earlier, envy is pervasive. As we age, we developed an envy for the world. People just say it’s being jaded, but that’s an evasion.

Advertising feeds envy in us? Yes, advertising does. It gets our attention away from our actual lives. If we were just accustomed to it at all, our attention would be very narrow in function, but it isn’t. Our attention is on a lot of things in a given day, because in fact we are intensely interested in our lives. But we don’t like our lives because we are envious of what we perceive “real life” to be, and our life just doesn’t seem as real to us in that comparison.

The grass is always greener… That comparison is a serious mental delusion. I read a story once that was really a general scenario. A male head of a family packs up his possessions, wife, and kids, and leaves his old home. On arriving in the new community he asks a local older gent what the townspeople are like. The old man asked him what the people were like where he was from. He said they were selfish, and rude, and untrustworthy, and is why he left. The old man then said “Oh ya, they are like that here also” and the man moves on out of that community. Another comes, same scenario, when asked what his former community was like he said “Oh, they were wonderful people, trustworthy, and honest, and supportive” and the old man just smiles and welcomes him.

Where ever you go there you are. Envy and jealousy are you, or not. You have a lot of power over your own life, and it comes from a very simple realization. Medical professionals say that due to my own condition I “live in my own head”. Well, the secret is you do too. Want to change your life? Change your mind. Then you may realize the big bad life that had you so scared, or so jealous, was actually quite gentle and supportive, and the only problem was in your choices.

It hit me hard when I heard the study that over 90% of your thoughts in any day are the same as every other day. What a waste. Indeed, it’s like a recording device. For the most part your brain works in circles, but your mind is bigger than your brain, and it controls the switches. I recognize I don’t have to envy anything. It’s a big bother, so I choose not to. This is part of why I don’t do gossip. I really am just not that interested in other peoples lives. Mine is much more interesting to me.

There is a lyric from a song I like, “I’m bigger than my body gives me credit for.” It’s very true, and you need be jealous of nothing. The world is yours when you don’t see everything as a possession. The world can be yours when you don’t feel you have to insist it’s exclusively yours. I claim the world. I live in it, and that’s ok by me. Well, at least most of the time…